Sublime

Valerio Borghese

With its publication Wilson became, as Frederick Jackson Turner saw it, “the first southern scholar of adequate training and power who has dealt with American history as a whole.” Other reviewers shared Turner’s admiration for Wilson’s history, yet they couldn’t help but notice the author’s fondness for the Ku Klux Klan, an organization whose

While this last was an overstatement and probably a rumor that Donovan himself had spread, it was not far from the mark. Twenty-two years earlier, when presented the Medal of Honor for actions on the Western Front at an award ceremony in the New York City Armory, Donovan had melodramatically unclasped the strap, then re-presented it to the four

“I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but by blood”—his last words before execution were recorded, and, as has often been noted, they were prophetic. But they were also only partly true. Certain crimes were ceased by the Civil War, but they have not been purged. Not yet. Harpers Ferry is

officer spoke good English, and the enemies chatted for some minutes about the cold, and how they would like to light a fire. They had just passed a farmhouse, he said, where there might be schnapps and a pig. Could they roast it? The Canadian said later, “The war was over for him, and I guess he was glad.” Then, suddenly, the lieutenant leading

Howard K. Smith, who fled Nazi Germany on the last train from Berlin before Hitler declared war on the United States in 1941; James Cameron, whose iconic 1946 report from the Bikini atom tests was perhaps the most literary and philosophical article ever published in a newspaper.